Engineering Manager, Release Engineering

AI at Zapier At Zapier, we build and use automation every day to make work more efficient, creative, and human. So if you’re using AI tools while applying here - that’s great! We just ask that you use them responsibly and transparently. Check out our guidance on How to Collaborate with AI During Zapier’s Hiring Process, including how to use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or others during our hiring process - and when not to. Hi there! We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a new Release Engineering team dedicated to improving how engineers ship, test, and secure software at scale. This team builds and evolves the systems that power our delivery pipelines, testing frameworks, supply chain safeguards, and the shared tooling engineers rely on every day. If you love solving developer experience challenges, guiding teams through technical modernization, and shaping foundational engineering infrastructure, this might be a great fit. You’ll manage a team focused on creating a reliable, secure, and scalable delivery ecosystem. That includes modernizing CI/CD, evolving testing platforms, introducing guardrails and automation, improving release observability, and strengthening software supply chain security. Your leadership will ensure we continue to ship high-quality software rapidly while reducing operational risk. You’ll partner closely with engineering teams across the org to evolve shared systems, reduce bespoke infrastructure, and grow distributed ownership for release and test workflows. About You You’ve led platform or infrastructure teams before: You have experience managing engineers working on CI/CD, build systems, testing frameworks, developer tooling, or platform infrastructure. You know what good delivery and reliability practices look like and can help your team execute against them. You understand the needs of product engineers: You think about engineers as customers and build systems that scale with simplicity. You’re skilled at gathering feedback, understanding workflows, and identifying where tooling will have the biggest impact. You bring technical depth in delivery and reliability: You’ve worked with modern CI/CD architectures, artifact management, automated testing systems, and supply chain security tooling. You can guide engineers through tradeoffs and provide clarity in ambiguous infrastructure problems. You create alignment across teams: You enjoy collaborating with engineering leaders, surfacing insights, and ensuring shared platform needs are prioritized effectively. You’re comfortable balancing long-term investment with near-term improvements. You communicate with clarity: Whether discussing tradeoffs, writing proposals, or presenting roadmap decisions, you explain complex systems in simple terms. You build trust through transparency and follow-through. You care about engineering culture: You lead with empathy, create an inclusive environment, provide actionable feedback, and help engineers grow. People on your team feel supported and energized. Additional experience that would be helpful Experience evolving or modernizing legacy delivery or testing systems Familiarity with supply chain security practices (artifact signing, SBOMs, provenance) Experience improving test reliability or decoupling monolithic testing frameworks Background building internal platforms or frameworks that serve multiple product teams Things You’ll Do Lead a high-performing Release Engineering team: Recruit, mentor, and support engineers while creating a healthy, collaborative, impactful team environment. Improve software delivery reliability and consistency: Evolve CI/CD systems to be faster, more secure, more observable, and easier for engineers to extend and operate. Modernize testing and validation platforms: Partner with teams across engineering to decouple tightly coupled testing systems, improve reliability, and enable distributed contribution. Strengthen supply chain security: Integrate automated safeguards like artifact signing, policy enforcement, and provenance tracking into the delivery lifecycle. Retire bespoke infrastructure: Identify custom-built systems that can be replaced with maintainable, standardized tooling or frameworks. Define strategy and roadmap: Work with engineering leaders to create a clear multi-quarter plan for how the delivery ecosystem evolves. Drive cross-org adoption: You’ll guide engineers and teams through changes in workflows, tooling, and standards, ensuring adoption through clarity, documentation, and empathy. Build visibility into delivery performance: Partner with engineering and data teams to develop actionable metrics around release velocity, reliability, and security. Application Deadline: The anticipated application window is 30 days from the date job is posted, unless the number of applicants requires it to close sooner or later, or if the position is filled. Even though we’re an all-remote company, we still need to be thoughtful about where we have Zapiens working. Check out this resource for a list of countries where we currently cannot have Zapiens permanently working.